1

Darwin's Dangerous
Idea

Dramatizations of Darwin's
life, interspersed with commentaries by philosopher Daniel Dennett,
biologist Stephen Jay Gould, and historian James Moore. Darwin's theory
that all living things evolved from a common ancestor in one "great
tree of life." Drug resistance in HIV. Biologist Kenneth Miller
on the vertebrate eye and the role of God. Similarities between humans
and apes.

A. The Voyage of the
Beagle

Charles Darwin originally
tried to follow a family tradition of studying medicine, but he
found it not to his liking and switched to divinity school instead.
Darwin possessed an abiding interest in nature, however, and in
1831 he took a position as ship's naturalist on board H.M.S. Beagle,
which the British navy was sending to chart the waters off South
America. Darwin also served as a traveling companion for the ship's
captain, Robert FitzRoy.

In the PBS series, the
curtain rises on a dramatization of Charles Darwin and Captain Robert
FitzRoy purchasing a mammal fossil from some herdsmen in South America
in 1833. As Darwin and FitzRoy complete the purchase, an exchange
between them sets the stage for the entire series:

FitzRoy: "Perhaps the ark was too small to allow
them entry, and they perished in the flood."

Darwin: [laughs]

FitzRoy: "What is there to laugh at?"

Darwin: "Oh, nothing, nothing."

FitzRoy: [indignant] "Do you mock me, or the Bible?"

Darwin: "Oh, neither."

FitzRoy: [scowling] "What sort of clergyman will
you be, Mr. Darwin?"

Darwin: [smiling] "Dreadful. Dreadful."

This dramatization distorts
the historical facts. Although FitzRoy was raised in a very religious
household, while voyaging on the Beagle his views were much closer
to Darwin's than this fictitious exchange implies--both because
FitzRoy was not so literalistic, and because Darwin was not so skeptical.
It was only several years later that FitzRoy took to defending a
literal interpretation of Genesis against Darwin's views.

By reading FitzRoy's
later views back into this period, the Evolution project starts
right off by promoting a stereotype that will re-appear throughout
the series: Rational scientists accept the evidence in order to
understand the reality of the natural world, but they are opposed
by irrational fundamentalists who reject the evidence in order to
preserve a literal interpretation of the Bible.

The truth is that Darwin's
theory was opposed in the nineteenth century by many eminent scientists.
While most scientists became persuaded that some kind of evolution
occurred, many of them disputed Darwin's claim that it was driven
by an unguided process of natural selection acting on random variations.
Instead, leading scientists advocated a type of guided evolution
that flatly contradicted Darwin's core thesis. Because of such scientific
criticism, according to historian Peter Bowler, Darwin's theory
of evolution by natural selection "had slipped in popularity
to such an extent that by 1900 its opponents were convinced it would
never recover." In addition to being opposed by scientists,
Darwin's theory was opposed by a broad spectrum of religious believers.
But the makers of Evolution simply ignore this rich and fascinating
history.

B. Darwin's Dangerous
Idea

From the Beagle in the
1830s the scene shifts to the present, for an interview with Tufts
University philosopher Daniel C. Dennett: "If I were to give
a prize for the single best idea anybody ever had, I'd give it to
Darwin for the idea of natural selection--ahead of Newton, ahead
of Einstein. Because his idea unites the two most disparate features
of our universe: The world of purposeless, meaningless matter-in-motion,
on the one side, and the world of meaning, and purpose, and design
on the other. He understood that what he was proposing was a truly
revolutionary idea."

The interview with Dennett
is followed by one with Harvard University evolutionary biologist
Stephen Jay Gould, who says: "The Darwinian revolution is about
who we are--it's what we're made of, it's what our life means insofar
as science can answer that question. So it, in many ways, was the
singularly deepest and most discombobulating of all discoveries
that science has ever made."

Following Gould, Open
University historian James R. Moore adds: "In Darwin's day
the idea of evolution was regarded as highly unorthodox, because
it went against all of natural history in Great Britain. It jeopardized
the standing of science, it did jeopardize the standing of a stable
society, the Bible, and the Church as well." We will meet all
three of these men several more times in this episode.

Evolution's producers
claim that they "examine empirically-testable explanations
for `what happened,' but don't speak to the ultimate cause of `who
done it'--the religious realm." But Dennett and Gould address
issues of meaning and purpose that are normally considered to be
in the province of religion, and Moore describes the challenge Darwin
posed to society and religion. It seems that Evolution has things
to say about the religious realm after all.

C. The Legend of "Darwin's
Finches"

The interviews with Dennett,
Gould and Moore are followed by some more imaginary scenes with
Charles Darwin, his brother Erasmus, Captain FitzRoy and others--many
serving to reinforce the scientist-vs.-fundamentalist stereotype.

At one point Charles
Darwin meets with ornithologist John Gould, who informs him that
some birds Darwin had collected on the Galápagos Islands
(600 miles west of Ecuador) were finches. Darwin later suggests
to FitzRoy that some finches had been blown to the islands from
the South American mainland and then diverged into the separate
species now present.

In a subsequent scene,
John Gould tells Darwin that the Galápagos finches he collected
differ mainly in the size and shape of their beaks. Darwin cradles
one bird in his hand and remarks: "And they're all descended
from this one--the common ground finch!" Darwin's eyes light
up and he rushes out of the room to tell his brother that he has
finally put the pieces together. "Perhaps everything is part
of one ancestral chain," Darwin concludes, and the finches
are simply one branch on the great "tree of life."

The scene then shifts
to a rainforest in present-day Ecuador, where Boston University
biologist Chris Schneider tells us: "One of the most important
ideas that Darwin had was that all living things on Earth were related.
How can you realize that you are part of this single tree of life
and not be fundamentally moved by that? It's something that stirs
the soul."

Schneider and his colleagues
are studying various animals, the narrator tells us, to "understand
how changing environments might trigger the evolution of new species."
One of Schneider's colleagues studies differences in birds' beaks,
and the narrator explains: "Even subtle differences may offer
clues as to how and why new species arise--just as it was the beaks
of finches from the nearby Galápagos Islands that spurred
Darwin's thinking in the 1830s. Darwin saw that the finches he brought
back had uniquely shaped beaks adapted to the different foods on
the islands. He envisioned that these different species of finch
had all descended with modifications from a common ancestral population
that had flown over from the mainland. Darwin's bold insight was
to apply this vision to all of life."

This story of "Darwin's
finches" is re-told in many biology textbooks, but it is largely
fictional. In fact, the Galápagos finches had almost nothing
to do with the process by which Darwin arrived at his theory. Much
of his information about the birds was erroneous, and since he never
visited South America north of Peru he was unaware of differences
between the Galápagos birds and those on the mainland. Darwin
did not even mention the finches in The Origin of Species.

D. Darwin's Tree of
Life

According to the narrator,
Darwin's "bold insight" is "now the bedrock of biology.
All forms of life on Earth have evolved from a single branching
tree of life." Darwin saw "that the great variety of life
on Earth--leopards and lichens, minnows and whales, flowering plants
and flatworms, apes and human beings--all descended from one root,
one common ancestor."

Enter Stephen Jay Gould
again: "It was, indeed, another one of his radical proposals
not only to say that evolution happened, but that there was a root,
a common ancestry, to everything that lived on this planet--including
us. You could construe it in another way, that is (I like to say)
more user-friendly: You could have thought, well, God had several
independent lineages and they were all moving in certain pre-ordained
directions which pleased His sense of how a uniform and harmonious
world ought to be put together--and Darwin says, No, it's just history
all coming [through] descent with modification from a single common
ancestry."

James Moore makes another
appearance, declaring: "The key to Darwin's thought in every
realm is that given enough time, and innumerable small events, anything
can take place by the laws of nature." This includes the raising
of mountains and the evolution of new species.

These statements seem
strangely out of place here. Why does a program that ostensibly
wants to avoid "the religious realm" have Stephen Jay
Gould tell us--by his tone, if not in words--that Darwin's theory
is preferable to divinely guided separate lineages? And why does
a program that has "enlisted the top minds in all of the sciences"
rely on a historian to assure us that anything can take place by
the laws of nature, given enough time?

The scene now switches
back to South America again, where biologists are finding camouflaged
insects and measuring the beaks of hummingbirds. The narrator tells
us that these birds all evolved from a common ancestor, and that
scientists now compare their DNA to determine how long ago they
diverged from that ancestor. But in these DNA comparisons common
ancestry is simply assumed; where is the evidence
for it?

And even though the common
ancestry of hummingbirds seems plausible, how do we know that "leopards
and lichens, minnows and whales, flowering plants and flatworms,
apes and human beings" also share a common ancestor? The only
actual evidence mentioned in this episode is the supposed universality
of the genetic code. According to the narrator: "The fact that
the blueprints for all living things are in the same language--the
genetic code of DNA--is powerful evidence that they all evolved
on a single tree of life."

So the genetic code is
supposed to be hard evidence for Darwin's theory that all living
things share a common ancestor. Let's take a closer look at it.

DNA is like a string
of words that tells a cell how to make the proteins it needs. DNA
words, however, are different from the words we use. In English,
we use an alphabet of 26 letters, from which we make thousands of
words of varying length. DNA, on the other hand, uses an alphabet
with only four letters, and it makes only three-letter words--a
total of 64 of them. Some of these three-letter words tell the cell
to start or stop making a protein, while the others stand for 20
kinds of subunits that the cell uses to assemble it.

DNA words--corresponding
to a start or stop signal, or to one of the 20 protein subunits--make
up "the genetic code." In the early 1970s, evolutionary
biologists thought that a given DNA word specified the same protein
subunit in every living thing, and that the genetic code was thus
universal. This was unlikely to have happened by chance, so it was
interpreted as evidence that every organism had inherited its genetic
code from a single common ancestor.

So the first hard evidence
that we are given for Darwin's tree of life turns out to be false.

The scene in the South
American rainforest concludes with Chris Schneider climbing a tower
that reaches high into the trees. Schneider asks: "How is it
that organisms that are so different can be related--that we are
related to a flatworm, or a bacteria? Darwin emphasized that small
changes would accrue every generation, and these changes could build
up to amount to enormous changes. It's not really hard to understand
how major transitions could come about, given that life has been
around for three and a half billion years." Schneider concludes
by assuring us that "Darwin really had it right."

In science, however,
assurances are not enough; we must also have evidence. So far, we
have been told that the universality of the genetic code is "powerful
evidence" for the relatedness of all living things. But that
"evidence" turns out to be false. How about Schneider's
assurance that an accumulation of slight differences through natural
selection can produce the enormous differences among living things?
Where is the evidence for that?

We haven't seen any so
far, but let's be patient. Maybe some is on the way.

E. Natural Selection
in HIV

The episode moves on
to some more dramatizations involving Darwin and his family, and
some return appearances by James Moore and Stephen Jay Gould (who
outline Darwin's theory of natural selection). We are then treated
to some beautiful wildlife photography of animals engaged in the
struggle for survival. Despite its faults, the Evolution series
periodically delights us with colorful and captivating footage of
the amazing creatures that inhabit our planet. (The colorful footage,
however, is not evidence for evolution.)

The narrator continues:
"Darwin couldn't actually see natural selection acting in real
time. But today scientists can, by observing the evolution of HIV,
the virus that causes AIDS." The scene shifts to an AIDS patient
who, we are told, "takes a host of medications, but to little
avail. The virus keeps adapting, evolving into new strains that
evade the drugs." The scene switches to another AIDS patient,
who is also "locked in a daily struggle against the rapidly
evolving virus."

According to the narrator,
the physician treating the second patient "has seen HIV evolve
into new varieties over the last dozen years. The virus is constantly
changing, subject to the forces of natural selection, in the environment
of the patient's body." This occurs because a drug kills some
viruses, but others acquire chance immunity to it and survive. The
survivors then resist further treatments by that particular drug.

The attending physician
describes this process of evolution: "In the case of HIV, we're
talking about minutes to hours to move from one species to another.
It's mind-boggling."

But changes within a
species--such as we observe in the case of HIV--are nothing new.
For centuries, farmers have been producing dramatic changes in crops
and livestock by artificially selecting certain specimens for breeding.
In fact, Darwin and his contemporaries took the success of domestic
breeding for granted. But well-bred cows are still cows, and well-bred
corn is still corn.

The revolutionary claim
in Darwin's theory was that the natural counterpart of artificial
selection can create not only new species, but also new forms of
organisms. The enormous differences we now see between "leopards
and lichens, minnows and whales, flowering plants and flatworms,
apes and human beings" go far beyond the small differences
we observe in domestic breeding. But artificial selection does not
produce new species, much less new forms of organisms, and this
has been a major stumbling block to evolutionary theory since the
time of Darwin.

The HIV story does nothing
to overcome this stumbling block. It does not show the origin of
a new species; it shows only the sorts of minor changes
within species that people have been observing for centuries.
So it provides no support for Darwin's theory that natural selection
can produce new species and higher level forms.

Enter Stephen Jay Gould
and Daniel Dennett again. According to Gould: "All that happens
in evolution, at least under Darwinian natural selection, is that
organisms are struggling, in some metaphorical and unconscious sense,
for reproductive success, however it happens." Dennett adds:
"The process of natural selection feeds on randomness, it feeds
on accident and contingency, and it gradually improves the fit between
whatever organisms there are and the environment in which they're
being selected. But there's no predictability about what particular
accidents are going to be exploited in this process."

So instead of presenting
us with evidence, this episode merely offers us more assurances
that natural selection can, indeed, do what Darwin said it could
do--and that it's random. The focus shifts back to treating AIDS
patients, and how evolutionary thinking allegedly helps them. But
the question with which we started was: What is the evidence that
natural selection can produce "leopards and lichens, minnows
and whales, flowering plants and flatworms, apes and human beings"
from one common ancestor? And our question remains unanswered.

F. The Evolution of
the Eye

More dramatizations follow,
culminating in an important conversation between Darwin and his
wife, Emma:

Emma: [reading from the unpublished manuscript of Charles's
book, The Origin of Species] "You say here that the human
eye may possibly have been acquired by gradual selection of slight,
but in each case useful, deviations."

Emma: "Can your theory account for the way my eyes,
and ears, and hands, and heart combine to reproduce the sounds
that Chopin heard in his head? Isn't that a God-given gift?"

Charles: "Well it's given--but not, I think, by
God."

James Moore returns and
says Emma "saw that her husband's speculations about the origins
of species and of humanity would jeopardize the Christian plan of
salvation. God was being made remote in her husband's universe.
Now if nature, by itself, unaided by God, could make an eye, then
what else couldn't nature do? Nature
could do anything! It could make everything!"

Brown University biologist
Kenneth R. Miller elaborates: "In Darwin's day, the very existence
of an organ of extreme perfection like the eye was taken by many
as proof of God, as proof of a Designer. How else could all the
intricate organs and substructures of the eye have come together
in just the right way to make vision so possible, and so perfect?
But it turns out the eye isn't exactly perfect after all. In fact,
the eye contains profound optical imperfections. And those imperfections
are proof, in a sense, of the evolutionary ancestry of the eye."

After calling the multi-layered
structure of the eye an evolutionary defect (because it can lead
to retinal tears as people grow older), the narrator tells us that
another defect "occurs because nerve cells and blood vessels
evolved to lie in front of the retina, where they interfere with
its ability to form sharp images. It's like trying to take a picture
through a foggy piece of glass. Now the optic nerve itself evolved
to connect to the brain through a hole in the retina. So the eyes
of all vertebrates have a small blind spot, right near the middle
of the visual field."

Miller attributes this
to natural selection: "Evolution starts with what's already
there, tinkers with it, and modifies it, but can never do a grand
re-design. So even the eye, with all of its optical perfection,
has clues to the fact that its origin is of the blind process of
natural selection."

But does imperfection
count as evidence against design? Many cars are noticeably imperfect,
though they are all designed. Every time a manufacturer recalls
a faulty product we are confronted with an example of imperfect
design. Miller is actually relying here on an unstated
theological argument (as Darwin often did in The Origin of
Species)--namely, that if God had made it, it would be perfect;
but it's not perfect, so God didn't make it, and evolution must
have. But why does an argument for evolution have to resort to theology?

In any case, it turns
out that the vertebrate eye is not as imperfect as Miller claims.
The light-sensing cells in the eyes of higher vertebrates are extremely
efficient at amplifying faint light. The efficient, hard-working
tips of the light-sensing cells need lots of energy, and they also
need to be constantly regenerated. The energy is provided by a dense
bed of capillaries, and the regeneration is facilitated by a special
layer of epithelial cells. If the tips of the light-sensing cells
faced forward, as Miller thinks they should, incoming light would
be blocked by the dense capillary bed and the epithelial layer.
Such an eye would be much less efficient--and
therefore less perfect--than the one we have now, because the capillaries
and epithelial cells are now behind the retina instead of in front
of it. It's true that the present arrangement causes the optic nerve
to leave a blind spot as it passes through the retina; but vertebrates
have two eyes, and the blind spots cancel out when both are used
to focus on the same object. Despite Miller's claim, the vertebrate
eye seems to be a masterpiece of engineering!

Another problem with
Miller's argument is its implication that the retina of vertebrate
eyes is backwards because evolution was forced to tinker with something
it already had. But animals regarded as evolutionarily more primitive
than vertebrates all have retinas that face
forward . There is no backwards retina in a primitive animal
that could have served as an evolutionary precursor to the vertebrate
eye. So where is Miller's "proof" of the evolutionary
ancestry of the vertebrate eye?

Stephen Jay Gould returns
to explain that "what Darwin was able to do was to point out
that you might think in logic that it's difficult to imagine a set
of intermediary stages between the simplest little spot of nerve
cells that can perceive light to a lens-forming eye that makes complex
images, but in fact these intermediary forms do exist in nature."

We are shown colorful
pictures of eyes in various animals, but all of them are complex;
none of them are "intermediary forms." The scene then
shifts to Sweden, where Lund University zoologist Dan-Eric Nilsson
has performed calculations and made a model to show how "we
can go all the way gradually, in very small steps, from a simple
pigment cup-eye--which has barely got the ability to determine the
direction of a light source--all the way to a complete camera-type
eye, the same type as we have ourselves."

Nilsson's interesting
presentation is periodically interrupted by more pictures of animals,
this time showing presumably intermediary forms--including a flatworm
with a simple cup eye, a chambered nautilus with a pin-hole camera
eye, and some vertebrates. But no biologist believes that chambered
nautiluses evolved into vertebrates, so it's not clear what relevance
these forms have to the argument. Nevertheless, Nilsson concludes:
"And that is really exactly the way eye evolution must proceed."

Nilsson's hypothesis,
however, requires a pre-existing layer of light-sensing cells, and
these require the simultaneous presence of several extremely complex
and specialized molecules. According to Darwin's theory, such a
complex molecular apparatus must have formed as a result of innumerable
small steps, but no one knows how this could have happened. The
origin of the light-sensitive cells that Nilsson needs for his hypothesis
remains a mystery.

We are not told about
these problems, however, and the narrator concludes: "He [Darwin]
later wrote that eyes must have evolved by numerous gradations from
an imperfect and simple eye to one perfect and complex, with each
grade being useful to its possessor. Nature, unaided by a designer,
could produce an organ of seemingly miraculous complexity."

So we are assured that
surely eyes must have evolved this way.
But did they, really?

G. More on Darwinism
and Religion

More dramatizations follow,
including some poignant scenes about the death of Darwin's daughter,
and the effect this tragedy had on his religious faith. Whatever
one may think of Darwin's theory, there is no denying that he was
an interesting man, and the dramatizations in this episode help
to bring him alive for us.

After James Moore and
Stephen Jay Gould comment on Darwin's religious views, the scene
shifts to a Roman Catholic Church, where Kenneth Miller sits listening
to a children's choir sing "All Things Bright and Beautiful."
The narrator explains: "Today scientists hold all conceivable
views on religion--from atheism, to agnosticism, to a general spirituality.
And many, like biologist Ken Miller, adhere to very traditional
beliefs."

"I'm an orthodox
Catholic, and I'm an orthodox Darwinist," Miller says. "My
idea of God is: Supreme being who acts in concert with the principles
and the ideas that Darwin explained to us about the origin of species.
My students often ask me, You say you believe in God--well what
kind of God? Is it a fashionable New
Age God, a pyramid-power kind of God? Do you think, like some scientists
do, that God is the sum total of the laws of physics? And I shake
those off and say that my religious belief is entirely conventional."
The congregation recites the "Our Father" in the background
as Miller continues: "It surprises students very often that
anyone could say that, that kind of very traditional, conventional
religious belief could be compatible with evolution, but it is.
I find this absolutely wonderful consistency with what I understand
about the universe from science and what I understand about the
universe from faith."

The narrator explains:
"For Miller, and millions of followers of all major religions,
notions of God and evolution are fully compatible. But not everyone
agrees." Daniel Dennett comes on again and says: "When
we replace the traditional idea of God the creator with the idea
of the process of natural selection doing the creating, the creation
is as wonderful as it ever was. All that great design work had to
be done. It just wasn't done by an individual, it was done by this
huge process, distributed over billions of years."

A clergyman then reads
to his congregation from the Bible: "God created man in His
image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created
them." As the clergyman continues speaking in the background,
Dennett remarks: "Whereas people used to think of meaning coming
from on high and being ordained from the top down, now we have Darwin
saying, No, all of this design can happen, all of this purpose can
emerge from the bottom up, without any direction at all. And that's
a very unsettling thought for many people."

Some comments by James
Moore are followed by more dramatizations featuring Darwin and his
contemporaries. These include Darwin's receipt of Alfred Russel
Wallace's manuscript outlining a theory very similar to his own
(which prompted Darwin finally to publish his theory in The Origin
of Species), and a re-enactment of the famous 1860 confrontation
between Bishop Samuel Wilberforce and Darwin's defender, Thomas
Henry Huxley. Though much of the history in these dramatizations
is accurate, it downplays the scientific opposition to Darwin's
theory and over-emphasizes the religious opposition.

If we had any doubt before,
it is now absolutely clear--despite what the producers claim--that
the Evolution project has quite a lot to say about "the religious
realm." After presenting us with a variety of conflicting religious
viewpoints, it leaves us with the distinct impression that some
of them are acceptable while others are not. How can we tell the
difference between the good and the bad? By their attitudes toward
Darwinian evolution. Religion that accepts Darwin's theory is good,
while religion that doesn't is bad.

So the PBS Evolution
series is far from neutral on religious issues. It has a very specific
agenda when it comes to "the religious realm." That agenda
was subtly introduced in the very first scene; it becomes more explicit
here; and--as we shall see in the last episode--it turns out to
be one of the major take-home lessons of the series.

H. Are Humans Just
Animals?

The concluding scenes
of this episode tackle the question of whether there is more to
human beings than their animal nature. Daniel Dennett addresses
the question first: "For more than a century, people have often
thought that the conclusion to draw from Darwin's vision is that
Homo sapiens--our species--that we're just animals, too, we're just
mammals, that there is nothing morally special about us. I, in myself,
don't think this follows at all from Darwin's vision, but it is
certainly the received view in many quarters."

Watch closely now as the camera pans over a stack of books
critical of Darwinism. The narrator says: "Ever since The Origin
of Species was published, strict believers in biblical creation
have attacked Darwin's vision. Their concerns aren't only about
the science of evolution. At stake, many believe, is nothing less
than the human soul." But two of the books in the stack are
by critics of evolution who are not strict
believers in biblical creation. Darwin On Trial is by Phillip E.
Johnson, a Berkeley law professor who is a Christian but who accepts
the geological evidence for an old Earth; and Darwinism: The Refutation
of a Myth is by Søren Løvtrup, an evolutionary biologist.
Yet Evolution misrepresents them as biblical literalists simply
because they are critical of Darwin's theory.

James Moore continues:
"To suggest that animals and plants--and us!--came into being
in a natural, law-like way, in the way the planets move, was to
put in jeopardy the human soul. And the human soul is the crux of
the matter, because if we are not different from animals--if we
don't live forever, in heaven, or in hell--then why should we behave
other than like animals in this life?"

The scene shifts to chimpanzees.
We are told that in Darwin's time there was not much evidence that
chimps and humans are closely related, but the fossil record and
DNA studies have since shown that they are. Similarity, especially
in the DNA, supposedly shows that we come from a common ancestor.

There are similarities
in the way we learn, too. Ohio State University developmental psychologist
Sally Boysen concludes from this that humans and chimps "have
a great deal of commonality in--literally--the neurological structure
that supports their ability to learn just like we do. Those things
are absolutely comparable, and had to
come from a common ancestor."

Kenneth Miller returns
to the screen to tell us that for all of the extraordinary similarities
between us and the apes, "there are striking differences,"
which he attributes to natural selection. According to Miller, "Darwin's
great idea is a grand and marvelous explanation that shows us that
we are united with every other form of life on this planet. And
I find that an exciting, and maybe even ennobling way, to look at
things."

As we saw above, however,
in the scene with the stack of books, anyone critical of Darwinian
evolution risks being stereotyped as a strict believer in biblical
creation. The message seems to be that it's OK for people to believe
whatever they want about God and the soul--as long as they don't
criticize evolution. Once again, there's good religion and there's
bad religion--and Darwinism enables us to distinguish between the
two.

The episode ends, appropriately,
with Darwin's death. Moore concludes by telling us that Darwin was
accorded great honor because "he had naturalized creation,
and had delivered human nature, and human destiny," into the
hands of those who were running the technological society of late
nineteenth-century England. "Society would never be the same.
Darwin's vision of nature was, I believe, fundamentally a religious
vision."

Amen.

Notes

.
According to historian Janet Browne, FitzRoy at the time of the
Beagle voyage was "much inclined to believe [Geologist Charles]
Lyell's revisionist anticlerical arguments"
against the historicity of Noah's Flood:

In particular,
FitzRoy doubted the existence of a Noachian Flood--the traditional
stumbling-block for Protestants since the seventeenth century. .
. . He could not believe that the extensive gravel and clay deposits
of Patagonia, hundreds of feet thick and apparently originating
in calm water, had been laid down in forty days. Lyell's secular
proposals seemed altogether more probable.

He said as much
to Darwin while they tramped the coastal plains puzzling over the
sequence of deposition. To understand these deposits was important
in relation to the fossil mammals and FitzRoy was as keen to unravel
the conundrum as Darwin.

During the
Beagle voyage, Darwin's religious views were largely indistinguishable
from those of FitzRoy. (Such disagreements as they had concerned
the topic of slavery [see Browne, 199] and social niceties.) Indeed,
during the voyage, FitzRoy and Darwin composed a joint letter defending
the work of English missionaries in Tahiti and New Zealand (Browne,
330). Furthermore, as Browne reports:

[Darwin] went
to church regularly throughout the voyage, attending the shipboard
ceremonies conducted by FitzRoy and services on shore whenever possible.
He and [naval lieutenant Robert] Hammond, spent some hours in Buenos
Aires waiting to hear if they could receive communion from the English
chaplain stationed there before going to Tierra Del Fuego. . . .
The Beagle Darwin, though occasionally doubtful, was by no means
a thorn in the side of the church. (326)

According to
Gertrude Himmelfarb: "Most biographers, carried away by the
zeal of hindsight, tend to hasten the development of Darwin's religious
views [i.e., away from orthodoxy], as they do his evolutionary views.
. . . [But there is a] total lack of evidence on this score."
Furthermore:

Several times
during the voyage he [i.e., Darwin] alluded to the vision of a quiet
English parsonage glimpsed through a grove of tropical palms. To
a college friend already installed in a country parish he wrote
[in Nov. 1832]: "I hope my wanderings will not unfit me for
a quiet life and that on some future day I may be fortunate enough
to be qualified to become like you a country clergyman. And then
we will work together at Natural History." And again the following
year [May 23, 1833]: "I often conjecture what will become of
me; my wishes certainly would make me a country clergyman."

The quotation
from Bowler is from Peter J. Bowler, Evolution: The History of an
Idea, Revised Edition (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1989), 246. The scientific opposition to Darwin's theory is described
in David Hull's Darwin and His Critics: The Reception of Darwin's
Theory of Evolution by the Scientific Community (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1983), while the broad spectrum of nineteenth-century
religious opposition to Darwin is described in James R. Moore's
The Post-Darwinian Controversies (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1979).

There is no
historical evidence for Darwin's shipboard reaction to FitzRoy's
Bible reading. According to Himmelfarb (64), Darwin was "shocked
when one of his shipmates flatly denied the fact of the flood. Indeed,
he was remembered by them as being naively orthodox in his beliefs.
Several of the officers (though themselves orthodox) were amused
once when he unhesitatingly gave the Bible as final authority on
a debated point of morality." Further details of Darwin's life
can be found in Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin: The Life
of a Tormented Evolutionist (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991).

.
Daniel Dennett believes that Darwinian evolution is not only unquestionably
true, but also bears "an unmistakable likeness to universal
acid--it eats through just about every traditional concept."
(Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life [New
York: Simon & Schuster, 1995], 63) In other words, Dennett
sees a conflict between Darwin's theory and all traditional forms
of religion--not just biblical fundamentalism.

Some other
quotes from Dennett's book (after which this episode is named) are:

Darwin's dangerous
idea cuts much deeper into the fabric of our most fundamental beliefs
than many of its sophisticated apologists have yet admitted, even
to themselves. (18)

To put it bluntly
but fairly, anyone today who doubts that the variety of life on
this planet was produced by a process of evolution is simply ignorant--inexcusably
ignorant. (46)

Evolutionists
who see no conflict between evolution and their religious beliefs
have been careful not to look as closely as we have been looking,
or else hold a religious view that gives God what we might call
a merely ceremonial role to play. (310)

Those whose
visions dictate that they cannot peacefully coexist with the rest
of us we will have to quarantine as best we can. . . . If you insist
on teaching your children falsehoods--that the Earth is flat, that
`Man' is not a product of evolution by natural selection--then you
must expect, at the very least, that those of us who have freedom
of speech will feel free to describe your teachings as the spreading
of falsehoods, and will attempt to demonstrate this to your children
at the earliest opportunity. Our future well-being--the well-being
of all of us on this planet--depends on the education of our descendants.
What, then, of all the glories of our religious traditions? They
should certainly be preserved, as should the languages, the art,
the costumes, the rituals, the monuments. (519)

Dennett recommends
that religion be "preserved in cultural zoos." His book
concludes with: "Is something sacred? Yes, I say with Nietzsche.
I could not pray to it, but I can stand in affirmation of its magnificence.
This world is sacred." (520)

.
According to historian of science Frank Sulloway, Darwin "possessed
only a limited and largely erroneous conception of both the feeding
habits and the geographical distribution of these birds."
And as for the claim that the Galápagos finches impressed
Darwin as evidence of evolution, Sulloway wrote, "nothing
could be further from the truth." (Journal of the History
of Biology 15 [1982], 1-53; Biological Journal of the Linnean
Society 21 [1984], 29-59.)

Darwin wrote
in the second edition of his Journal of Researches (London: John
Murray, 1845, 380): "The most curious fact is the perfect gradation
in the size of the beaks of the different species of [finches].
Seeing this gradation and diversity of structure in one small, intimately
related group of birds, one might really fancy that from an original
paucity of birds in this archipelago, one species had been taken
and modified for different ends." But Darwin by then had already
formulated his theory, so this was a speculative afterthought. Indeed,
the confusion surrounding the geographical labeling of Darwin's
specimens (alluded to in the PBS episode) made it impossible for
him to use them as evidence for his theory. Nor did Darwin have
a clear idea of the finches' ancestry. He did not visit the western
coast of South America north of Lima, Peru, so for all Darwin knew
the finches were identical to species still living on the mainland.

It wasn't
until the 1930s that the Galápagos finches were elevated
to their current prominence. Although they were first called "Darwin's
finches" by Percy Lowe in 1936 (Ibis 6: 310-321), it was ornithologist
David Lack who popularized the name a decade later. Lack's 1947
book, Darwin's Finches (Cambridge University Press), summarized
the evidence correlating variations in finch beaks with different
food sources, and argued that the beaks were adaptations caused
by natural selection. In other words, it was Lack more than Darwin
who imputed evolutionary significance to the Galápagos finches.
Ironically, it was also Lack who did more than anyone else to popularize
the myth that the finches had been instrumental in shaping Darwin's
thinking.

.
The universality of the genetic code was suggested by Francis
Crick in "The Origin of the Genetic Code," Journal of
Molecular Biology 38 (1968), 367-379. Exceptions to the code are
reviewed in Syozo Osawa, Evolution of the Genetic Code (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1995), and in Robin D. Knight, Stephen
J. Freeland and Laura F. Landweber, "Rewiring the Keyboard:
Evolvability of the Genetic Code," Nature Reviews: Genetics
2 (2001), 49-58. For a current list of exceptions to the genetic
code, go to:

.
The idea that the vertebrate eye is imperfect, and therefore must
be a product of Darwinian evolution, did not originate with Kenneth
Miller. In his 1986 book, The Blind Watchmaker (New York: W. W.
Norton), Richard Dawkins wrote:

Any engineer
would naturally assume that the photocells would point towards the
light, with their wires leading backwards towards the brain. He
would laugh at any suggestion that the photocells might point away
from the light, with their wires departing on the side nearest the
light. Yet this is exactly what happens in all vertebrate retinas.
Each photocell is, in effect, wired in backwards, with its wire
sticking out on the side nearest to the light. The wire has to travel
over the surface of the retina, to a point where it dives through
a hole in the retina (the so-called `blind spot') to join the optic
nerve. This means that the light, instead of being granted an unrestricted
passage to the photocells, has to pass through a forest of connecting
wires, presumably suffering at least some attenuation and distortion
(actually probably not much but, still, it is the principle of the
thing that would offend any tidy-minded engineer!). (p. 93)

See also Timothy
H. Goldsmith, "Optimization, Constraint, and History in the
Evolution of Eyes," The Quarterly Review of Biology 65:3 (1990),
281-322.

For a discussion
of the role played in Darwinian thinking by hidden theological arguments
(like the argument that God would only make perfect things), see
Paul A. Nelson, "The Role of Theology in Current Evolutionary
Reasoning," Biology and Philosophy 11 (1996), 493-517; and
Cornelius George Hunter, Darwin's God (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos
Press, 2001).

For arguments
against the modern Darwinian claim that the vertebrate eye is imperfect,
see George Ayoub, "On the Design of the Vertebrate Retina,"
Origins and Design 17:1 (1997), available at:

http://www.arn.org/docs/odesign/od171/retina171.htm

See also Michael
J. Denton, "The Inverted Retina: Maladaptation or Pre-adaptation?"
Origins and Design 19:2 (1997), available at:

http://www.arn.org/docs/odesign/od192/invertedretina192.htm

For general
background on the evolution of eyes, see L. Salvini-Plawen and Ernst
Mayr, "On the Evolution of Photoreceptors and Eyes," Evolutionary
Biology 10 (1977), 207-263. Neuroanatomist Bernd Fritzsch, though
an evolutionist, criticizes over-simplified explanations for the
evolution of the vertebrate eye in "Ontogenetic Clues to the
Phylogeny of the Visual System," in The Changing Visual System,
edited by P. Bagnoli and W. Hodos (New York: Plenum Press, 1991),
33- 49.

For a published
report of Nilsson's work, see Dan-Eric Nilsson and Susanne Pelger,
"A pessimistic estimate of the time required for an eye to
evolve," Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B 256 (1994),
53-58. See also Richard Dawkins, "The eye in a twinkling,"
Nature 368 (1994), 690-691.

.
Darwin's view, at least when he wrote The Origin of Species, seems
to have been that God created the universe and the natural laws
that govern it, but then turned it loose to run by itself. Unlike
many others who hold this view, however, Darwin believed that
the law of natural selection cannot produce any determinate outcome,
so no specific result of evolution is fore-ordained. As Darwin
wrote in a letter to Asa Gray in 1860, he was "inclined to
look at everything as resulting from designed laws, with the details,
whether good or bad, left to the working out of chance."
(Francis Darwin, ed., The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin [New
York: D. Appleton, 1887], II:105-106) See also Jonathan Wells,
Charles Hodge's Critique of Darwinism: An Historical-Critical
Analysis of Concepts Basic to the 19th-Century Debate (Lewiston,
NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1988).

.
The two books in the pile that are not by "strict believers
in biblical creation" are Darwin On Trial, by Phillip E.
Johnson (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 1991), and Darwinism:
The Refutation of a Myth, by Søren Løvtrup (London:
Croom Helm, 1987). Johnson, though a Christian, does not hold
to a literal six-day creation or six-thousand year history. Løvtrup
is an evolutionary biologist.

Darwinists
sometimes claim that it was Darwin who showed that humans are part
of nature. But that was never in doubt. Aristotle discusses emotions
that humans share with animals in his History of Animals, 488b12-20,
508a19-22, 571b9-11, 575a20-32, 581b12-21, 585a3-4, 588a22-31, 608a11-608b18,
629b6-8, and 630b18-23. Catholic theologian and philosopher Thomas
Aquinas discusses the animal nature of human beings in the Summa
Theologiae, First Part ("Treatise on Man") and First Part
of the Second Part ("Treatise on the Divine Government").
In the eighteenth-century, Swedish biologist Carolus Linnaeus classified
humans and apes together in one taxonomic family. For Aquinas and
Linnaeus, however, the similarities between humans and other animals
came from a common creator, not a common ancestor. The issue here
is not whether humans have an animal nature, but whether humans
are just animals.